The repudiation of the neanderthals

Lawrence Martin is the author of 10 books, including six national bestsellers. His most recent, Harperland, was nominated for the Shaughnessy Cohen award. His other works include two volumes on Jean Chrétien, two on Canada-U.S. relations and three books on hockey.

Tea Party candidates went down in the U.S. election. Right-side blowhards like Donald Trump came off looking like buffoons. Fox Newsers and their kin who predicted a big Republican win are eating crow. The white-bread Republican platform has been widely discredited for its narrowness and insensitivity to growing minorities.

So while it may have been an election that didn’t change the numbers much and left Washington just as divided as before, it performed a salubrious service for the American democracy. It served as a repudiation of the far right elements of the Republican Party that have done so much to poison and polarize the debate.

The rational and tolerant centre beat back the radical and intolerant right and a higher level of sanity may well result. In that the Republican vote was stung so badly by women, by gays, by blacks and by Latinos whose numbers will only continue to grow, the party will be under sustained pressure to sets its neanderthals adrift.

The GOP would do well to look to Canada’s Conservative party as an example of a political organization that has been able to triumph over progressives while remaining entrenched on the right. With the merger of Alliance and the Progressive Conservative parties in 2004, the progressives saw their place significantly diminished. But since that time Stephen Harper has been able to sell the country a more ideological brand of politics because he has been smart enough to keep his dinosaurs in the forest. There have been some exceptions to this, Rob Anders and Vic Toews being among them, but not enough to stir great angst among voters.

Mitt Romney, who came out of the GOP’s more rational wing, was torn every which way by his party. To win the primaries he had to shift to the right, so much so that when it came time to moderate for the general election, he had difficulty doing so in a credible fashion. The primaries featured Tea Party stalwarts like the gay-bashing Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum, cave dwellers whose views appealed to latent prejudices of a great many. Santorum at one point lashed out at Obama for wanting all Americans to get a chance at a college education.

The Tea Party is taking much of the blame for the GOPs failure to win a majority in the Senate. Scott Brown — its standard-bearing senator, who won Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts seat — went down to defeat Tuesday. Prominent candidates Todd Akin in Missouri and Richard Mourdock in Indiana did the same. Their views on why women should have to bear the children of rapists sealed their doom. In the House of Representatives some Tea Partiers lost their seats. Bachmann was barely able to hang on to hers.

The results were all too much for Trump, the twittering tycoon who has been a leader in the goofy campaign to convince the country that Barack Obama was born in another hemisphere. He blasted the Obama election victory as a “total sham” and a “disaster for democracy.” It was such a disgusting injustice, he wrote, “that we should march on Washington and stop this travesty.”

Not finished yet, he alleged that “the world is laughing at us” — when, in fact, polls showed an Obama victory would be welcomed in foreign capitals around the globe. The world is laughing at Trump — and the GOP would do well to rein him in. Again, if we look at a Canadian comparison, check out the even-handed reaction of Conrad Black to the election result — Black being an archconservative who is no stranger to the braggadacio of big-money men like Trump.

The Sean Hannitys and Rush Limbaughs of the GOP galaxy will likely maintain their large audiences despite being ever so wrong about this election. But it is Republicans like Canada’s own David Frum, who has had the fortitude to take on Limbaugh’s straitjacket version of conservatism, whose views will now be in the ascendancy in the party.

The presidential election was by no means a big leap toward the Democratic party. The margins of the Democrats’ victories in the swing states were so small that it can be argued that, were it not for the momentum shift brought on by hurricane Sandy, they would have lost the election.

But for the Republicans to have been beaten, given all the economic woes the country has experienced, took some doing. Republican John Weaver hit it right when he told the New York Times that the party was on a demographically unsustainable path.

“We have a choice: we can become a shrinking regional party of middle-aged and older white men, or we can fight to become a national governing party. And to do the latter we have to fix our Hispanic problem as quickly as possible, we’ve got to accept science and … not tolerate the intolerant.”

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